April 11, 2018 Comments Off on Attending the Transformative Learning Conference as a First-Time Attendee

Written by Therese Williams, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, UCO College of Business ISOM – As a first-year Assistant Professor at UCO, I received a wonderful opportunity to attend the 2018 Transformative Learning Conference in Oklahoma City. In exchange for volunteering one day of the conference I was able to attend one day with the registration fee waived. […]

February 15, 2018 Comments Off on Launching Heroic Journeys of Transformation for Our Students and Ourselves

You’ve heard of Michael Wesch. (Here’s a YouTube reminder from a decade ago; Wesch, 2007.) In an intensely reflective keynote presentation in the spring of 2017, he examined what he and Ken Bain (2004) both call “big questions.” Bain discusses the big questions a college class might help students answer that relate to the larger […]

December 14, 2017 Comments Off on No More Millennials Entering College: How Can We Facilitate Gen Z Transformation?

These students don’t view the world in 50-minute, three-credit classes. If our mission is to prepare kids to be successful, the thing you have to prepare them for more than anything is adaptability. No one knows what the world is going to look like in the next 10 years. — Craig Chanoff, VP Education Services, […]

October 16, 2017 Comments Off on “Engaged, Participatory Rethinking” to Transform Our Classrooms and Higher Education

We do a poor job helping students translate the specific content or knowledge gained in our classrooms into a tool (informational, conceptual, methodological, epistemological or affective) that will help them thrive in life. If higher education doesn’t do that — if it isn’t geared to helping students succeed beyond the final exam and after graduation […]

Student engagement is a good thing. We’ve heard that for decades. Alexander Astin asked the question, “What matters in college?” then answered by saying a big percentage of what matters is student engagement (Astin, 1997). Pike & Kuh (2005, p. 186) agree in a summary statement about this issue, saying, “. . . students learn […]

[W]hy would we expect students who have come of age in neighborhoods and schools surrounded by people who largely look and think as they do to be highly skilled at handling personal insults hurled by those with different, yet similarly narrowly shaped, experiences and beliefs? Why should we expect that people who have experienced different […]

April 3, 2017 Comments Off on The Transformative Impact of Sustainability Pedagogy and Andragogy

Critical Transformative Learning goes beyond the personal toward community action, even societal transformation. Approaching sustainability education through transformative experience could have pragmatic impact on the learner, the community and the environment. (Singleton, 2015) Education for Sustainability is “defined as a Transformative Learning process that equips students, teachers, and school systems with the new knowledge and […]

February 17, 2017 Comments Off on Engaging or Ignoring the Disorienting Dilemma: Entitlement to Opinion?

Recently released results of a survey of K-12 teachers indicate that by a wide margin the factor most often reported as “very important” for student achievement is “student engagement and motivation” (Education Week Research Center, 2016, p. 15). While the question in the survey related to students’ academic achievement, would your response as a college […]

January 12, 2017 Comments Off on Evolutionary and Revolutionary Transformative Learning

Kroth and Boverie (2009) developed a 4-cell grid to conceptualize the mix between the speed of Transformative Learning (TL, which they characterize as “Discovering”) and whether the TL occurred because the prompt to change was imposed from outside or because the learner intentionally put herself into the transformative scenario: Quadrant 1 represents a transformative […]

Captured in two of Central’s six tenets, global and cultural competencies and research, scholarly and creative activities are prevalent throughout the UCO campus, in both curricular and extra-curricular settings. However, one student group is celebrating its diversity, while promoting research, scholarship and creativity. Diverse Student Scholars (DSS) is a group comprised of both undergraduate and graduate […]

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